In the one hundred fifty-four sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), the seasons, invoked as metaphors for lovers’ joys and sorrows, turn up again and again, like pages in a calendar. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” asks the speaker at the start of Sonnet 18. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” begins the famous autumnal “Sonnet 73,” which appeared as Poem of the Day last October. And there’s “Sonnet 98,” Poem of the Day for Shakespeare’s birthday this year, when “proud-pied April” has made everything new, except the unending winter of a separation. 

Sonnet 97, today’s Shakespearean sonnet, marks the start of bleak December and the inexorable shortening of the days. It takes up again this idea of separation as winter. “How like a winter hath my absence been,” says the speaker in the first line. It’s a strange way to put things: generally you’d imagine yourself as the fixed point of the relational compass, present to your own vivid daily circumstances, while the other person inhabits the shadowy land of absence. 

Instead, this speaker moves through a barren half-reality, feeling nothing but “freezings” and darkness, while the one he loves occupies the real world of fertile summer and “teeming autumn,” rife with imagery that suggests all the lovemaking the two of them have missed. At least, he’s been missing out. What she’s been doing, while “summer and his pleasures wait on thee” — well, we don’t know, do we?

“Summer and his pleasures” might “wait” on her in the sense of attending to her desires. Or they might “wait” virtuously, as in being patient. Either way, the speaker in his exile loiters, like the fair knight of our November poem, Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in a withered land where no birds sing. “Or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer / That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.” 

Sonnet 97: How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been
by William Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.